The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(109)

Okay.

Thanks to him—thanks to Wesley—the nightmare is over. Jenna Coeur is coming back at last.

“Thank you.” Her voice seems to echo in hundreds, thousands, of microphones. Flashbulbs are still exploding before her eyes. The room is silent, waiting. Someone coughs.

You can do this.

“Seven years ago last week marked the beginning of a nightmare I never thought would end. What happened that night is a very long and complicated story. Maybe someday I’ll decide to tell it. But right now the only story I’m interested in telling is Ingrid Bergman’s. I’ve been preparing for this role for eighteen months, learning everything I could about this fascinating woman . . . this courageous woman. About the way she lived . . . the way she died.”

A lump rises in her throat. She’s thinking not about Ingrid Bergman, but about Meredith Heywood. And the others.

Eighteen months ago she set out to learn everything she could about breast cancer. She stumbled across a vibrant online community of women who were living with—and dying from—the disease. Ever the method actress, she was drawn into their world, essentially becoming one of them. She celebrated their triumphs, mourned their losses, and took up their battle cry, immersing herself not just in the emotions, but in the politics.

For eighteen months their world was her world.

Now it’s time now for her to move on.

She takes a deep breath. “I’m grateful to Wesley Baumann for giving me this opportunity, and to my manager, Cory, for believing in me, and to the friends who saw me through the last seven years . . . I couldn’t have done it without you.”

I only wish you could know how much you meant to me—or why I left without saying good-bye.



“Kay . . . who did this to you, Kay?”

Landry’s voice, farther away now.

Was it like this for Meredith? Kay wonders. Could she hear me moving around her bedroom that night as she lay there on the floor? I should have talked to her. I should have told her why I did what I did. That it was out of love for her. I couldn’t bear the thought of her suffering the way Mother had. I knew she couldn’t bear it either . . .

Sick . . . bald . . . dying . . .

When Meredith told her she was terminally ill, something shifted inside Kay.

All those years at the prison, watching criminals march off to the lethal injection chamber, had taken their toll. Killers who had tortured innocent victims to death were allowed to escape their hellish prison existence by the most merciful means imaginable. They were the ones who deserved to suffer. Not their victims.

Not Meredith.

She knew what she had to do. She had to help her friend escape.

Maybe I had selfish reasons, too. Maybe I couldn’t bear the thought of being the first to go. Maybe I needed Meredith to be there, waiting for me, so that I wouldn’t be alone when the time came.

Was it so wrong, really?

When she first came up with the plan, Kay didn’t think so. It made a bizarre kind of sense, and after all, it was going to happen anyway. She even did some reading about euthanasia.

Mother used to talk about that a lot. Dr. Kevorkian had been tried and convicted around the time her own illness began to progress.

“They do lethal injection executions at the prison where you work,” she’d say. “You can get your hands on those drugs, can’t you?”

“No, Mother,” Kay would tell her. “I can’t.”

Yes, she could.

She did.

She kept the deadly liquid in the drawer of her nightstand, just in case Mother’s pain became unbearable.

Kay found herself imagining the heartfelt deathbed apology her mother would make, for withholding her love all those years.

I do love you, Kay, Mother would manage to say. I’ve always loved you, more than anything in the world.

Sick . . . bald . . . dying . . .

And then her mother would beg her to help her, and she would gently inject her with the drugs that would stop her heart and end the suffering at last.

That wasn’t how it happened.

The apology never came, and so . . .

Kay allowed the torture to go on.

She didn’t cause it. She wasn’t evil.

She just didn’t put a stop to it. She let it happen.

Sick . . . bald . . . dying . . .

Dead.

The potassium chloride and SUX didn’t go to waste, though. Kay planned to use the lethal cocktail on herself someday, when the time was right. She even packed it into her bag the day she drove to Cincinnati for Meredith’s funeral, along with a syringe. Just in case . . .

Most of the time, she was at peace with how she’d helped Meredith, but there were moments—moments when her head ached and her thoughts churned and she wasn’t so sure.

Then last weekend, when she met the others in person—Landry and Elena—she realized she wasn’t alone in this world after all. She needed them, yes—but more importantly, they needed her.

From Cincinnati, she drove to Massachusetts. It wasn’t easy—that long drive on busy highways though the Northeast corridor—but she did it. For Elena.

The way Tony Kerwin was tormenting her . . .

All that stress was toxic. She had to do whatever she could to save Elena from a recurrence.

I’ll do anything for my friends, she told the woman on the plane this morning, the one with the rosy future. She meant it.